Not really much time for the journal today. A couple of deadlines need to be made...

Lay in bed this morning reading The Author, the Society of Authors publication. Interestingly, sales of childrens books were down again in the UK, in 2001, by 5%. (The adult market grew by 6% in that time.) Which is interesting because I was told at ALA that that wasn't happening, look at J.K. Rowling and everyone, children's books have never experienced such a boom etc. I'd love to see the US numbers...

Anyway, The Author is filled with lots of immensely practical articles by working authors, agents, commissioning editors and so on. One line which resonated deeply, as I try to decide which invitations to go where I accept this year and next year, and how much time I can actually give to going places and meeting people and signing things, was from a Philip Pullman speech given at the Creators' Rights Alliance -- "There comes a time in the careers of many of us when, in the words of Allan Ahlberg, people like our work so much they want us to stop doing it".

My current favourite print publication is probably The Week. Somewhere not far behind comes New Scientist, which is so much more interesting than the increasingly insipid Scientific American, which I buy in airports and read on planes without pleasure. I suppose that what interests me as a writer is the odder, more Fortean, or at least goofier end of science, which New Scientist is much more willing to provide. Did you know that Semen is an anti-depressant (I'd make a joke about that, but it's just too easy...) or that Persuasion is now replacing coercion in Animal experimentation ("Come on now, Rover. All the other dogs are smoking twenty a day. They're starting to talk about you. 'Oh, he's too lah-dee-dah to light one up with the lads.' And you know the lady dogs'll like it. That's the spirit, here I'll light it for you...") or that a six-week stay at a Hindu temple in Tamil Nadu can produce the same improvement in people with severe psychiatric disorders as a month-long course of standard drugs? All the sorts of things a writer needs to have composting down in the back of his head.

There are several hundred FAQs in over the last few days, many of which aren't FAQs but people writing to say how much they liked Coraline. Here's one...

In some of the earlier journal entries, you've said you'd be signing or
reading Coraline in Dublin. However, there's no information on it under
the 'Where's Neil' listings. Is that still in the works? Thank you!

I need to talk to Bloomsbury. I know I'm going to Dublin, and doing lots of media (TV, radio, newspapers). It would be rather odd to be sent to Dublin and not to sign. But there's no listing in so far. So I'm not really sure. As soon as I know anything one way or another I'll stick it up here and on the Where's Me bit.

Right. Off to write...

Nothing exciting to report today, other than the trade paperback of Adventures in the Dream Trade will have most of the typos corrected,. Big thanks to the stirling work of Davey Snyder and Chip Hitchcock.

Michael Zulli e-mailed me to let me know that he is not a very technological person, and that if anyone who has one could e-mail him a gif or a jpg of the Sweeney Todd poster he would be astonishingly grateful. Send it to him at Zedcorp@aol.com (motto: Zedcorp -- taking over the world one letter at a time.)

http://www.locusmag.com/2002/News/News07Log.html is the 2002 Locus Awards. American Gods won for best Fantasy Novel. (Connie Willis took best SF novel for Passage.)

Just got home from a mammoth trip to and from the airport FEDEX terminal to get the copy-edited version of Adventures in the Dream Trade back to NESFA press, for their trade paperback edition. Which should be out in time for WorldCon, with luck.

On the phone with Michael Zulli who is telling me stuff while I am typing...

(ahem) if you wish to buy one of the SWEENEY TODD Posters. The prices are:

Unsigned -- $25.00 (this includes shipping in the US. Ask him if you're somewhere else.)
Signed -- $40 (again, US shipping included). These are the ones that sold for $100 when people had them. (They were signed by both of us, in gold, in the early 1990s). Michael needs floorspace.

He's accepting Money Orders (eg Western Union, Postal Orders, etc. NOT cheques, NOT -- yet at least -- PayPal). To order send your money orders to:

ZEDCORP
PO Box 393
Agawam MA
01001 USA

For more information, overseas rates, or to enquire about what original art, sketchbook stuff, or other rare Michael Zulli work (and publications) that you would kill for but he just regards as taking up space he has and is willing to sell, e-mail him at ZEDCORP@AOL.COM.

This was a public service message brought to you by the Campaign to Unclutter Zulli.

There's another Coraline review here.

Home now, and tired.

Here's a very nice review of Coraline at Strange Horizons , although it tells more plot than some of you may want to know.

Lots of Canadians have e-mailed me to point out that copies of Coraline are in their local comic-book shops.

I had dozens of interesting anecdotes to tell, but they've all gone flat and sleepy, even the ones about Holly phoning me yesterday on the hour to let me know where I was on Amazon.com's charts "You're up to 15, Dad. Oops. Now it says 820. Now it says 15 again," or the lady at the check in counter at the airport this morning, who got all excited when she realised I was me and printed out a duplicate of my boarding pass for me to sign for her friend, who had the same name as her.

let' s see...

i sound a bit husky right now. Last night I read the whole of Coraline to a full house. It took three and half hours... I suppose that extra half hour was as much from audience reaction time as anything else. They seemed happy, except for the people in the balcony at the back who wanted giant screens to see what I looked like. Standing ovation, which was really nice of them. And Daniel Handler, a close associate of Lemony Snicket, yelled "Read it again!"...

The best thing about it was how many of them had not read or heard the story. They practically cheered when Coraline... well, never mind. It's in chapter 11.

Saw lots of friends, all for less time than I would have liked.

I signed about 900 copies at Cody's yesterday afternoon and drew a sinister rat in every copy, except for one, which I drew a button in. (Many of the rats were not sinister. Some were cute. Some were funny. And several of them were deeply disturbing.) Cody's should still have copies, along with the wonderfully creepy posters of the event (which were given to the people there.)

This morning Coraline is #29 on Amazon (and tops their movers and shakers list) and #38 on Barnes and Noble.

E-mail from the magnificently named Felicia Quon from Harper Canada tells me that Canada is always a couple of weeks behind the US, so copies of Coraline should be generally available there in two weeks.

Today I sign books, eat sushi while being interviewed, sign more books, and sign more books. Also going (with the kids) on a tour of Pixar.

Right. On with the motley. Will report in tonight.

Hurrah! It's publication day! Which means everyone in the whole world except places that aren't America can now buy Coraline at their local bookshop unless it doesn't stock it.

(Got a frustrated message from a Canadian this morning wanting to knowwhy it wasn't on sale in Canada. Not sure -- I checked amazon.ca and chapters.ca and they both show it as being for sale.)

Strange dreams last night -- in the oddest one I was trying to convince some people that the bloodstains on their white carpet were left by pelicans "in their piety" (a classical motif where pelicans feed their children with blood from their breasts) while they, being naturalists, were convinced that pelicans were fish eaters and not breast-bleeders, and that I was trying to cover up for a particularly nasty murder...

right. The day is starting. Wish me luck for tonight.

In San Francisco. Borrowed a computer from Amacker Bullwinkle, who also did the poster for the show tomorrow. Am much too tired and have nothing sensible to say at all, other than goodnight, and Coraline entered the Amazon.com top 100 today, and got an amazing mini-review in the UK Independent on Sunday. Delicate and extraordinary, it reads like Alice in Wonderland crossed with Stephen King...

There should be tickets enough to take care of the people who show up at the door without tickets tomorrow, I hope. It's going to be videoed and recorded, and I'm trying to work out if there's anywhere in the shape of the event to do a Q & A.

Jonathan Strahan is the reviews ediitor of Locus, and his blog is at http://members.iinet.net.au/~jstrahan/blogger.html. He does a lovely review of Coraline while explaining that he won't be reviewing it in Locus.

And I think that the perversity of inanimate objects is somehow all tied up with the way that computers only fail when they know it will do the most damage. Like the night I finished NEVERWHERE, and, delighted, ran a translation program on the chapters, in order to spellcheck them in a different word processing program. And in moments I had a book that consisted of 20 files, each with zero bytes in. I was a long way from home, but several phone calls later a nice man turned up with Norton Utilities, and I spent that night finding the last couple of chapters (everything else had been very backed up, or at least, e-mailed to friends).

Bloody technology. Good night.